Richard Peck’s A Long Way from Chicago never fails to bring chills of nostalgia

One of my 2025 New Year’s Resolutions was to start building a list of books that are kid-friendly. My main motivation for doing this is to find ways to counter the sheer wokeness that’s plaguing schools all over the country and, by extension, the West.

Listen, I’m gonna be real: Kids don’t need to be reading about some of the absolute madness that’s being force-fed down their throats if their parents don’t deem them appropriate. And yes, I’ve seen quite a few titles that “make me half-sick,” and there are probably a whole lot more I’m not seeing.

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Take that how you will. But for parents who are reading this and wouldn’t mind snagging some ideas that they might like their kid reading, then they’re in the right place. Lately, I’ve dipped into my memory bank and started listing some books that I enjoyed between Grades 5 and 8 about a thousand years ago.

Hey, I’ll give credit where credit’s due: Government schooling may have been useless by many accounts. Trust me: I just read Tom DiLorenzo’s Axis of Evil: America’s Three Worst Presidents, and I’m still dumbfounded by the lies government school history teachers told me. But at least a few teachers knew how to pick out some interesting books. Among them were:

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

Great introduction to what life was like under Nazi control in Denmark

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt

Maybe Tom Riddle should’ve picked it up

Nothing but the Truth by Avi

Written documentary-style, but gives us some low-level corruption

A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck

Today’s topic of discussion!

A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck

Sequel to today’s topic of discussion

Above are just a handful of works, and you may remember me talking about the final book on this list in a previous post. Yes, I’ll be reading A Year Down Yonder in 2025, as I promised. But why read it without checking out the prequel first, A Long Way from Chicago?

Not a novel: a short-story cycle

A Long Way from Chicago might look like a short novel, or maybe a novella is a more appropriate term. But you’re really reading a short-story cycle that contains a prologue, seven short stories, then an epilogue.

They’re easy to read, entertaining, and, best yet, told from the point of view of a memorable character, Joey Dowdel, who is a look-before-you-leap type. His sister, and the protagonist of A Year Down Yonder, Mary Alice, has a similar mindset.

But, unfortunately for this brother-sister duo, Grandma Dowdel, is rather sly, cunning, clever, and reckless. Yeah, you can already see the humor playing out, right?

How many of us had the exact opposite? Grandparents who were full of wisdom and probably knew what was best for you while you were the reckless one? Oh, I can already see the hands going up.

Yeah, and when I say reckless, there’s a story involved that’s called One-Woman Crime Wave, so Grandma isn’t afraid to bend the rules here. She’ll even tell “whoppers” if it means tipping the scales in her favor.

Uh, this book is child-friendly?

Right now, you might be thinking that Grandma would be a bad influence on your kids. Heck, Mary Alice even voiced those concerns to Joey in one of the stories. But here’s the kicker: Grandma is often leveraging things to get back at others.

For example, in the story The Mouse in the Milk, the Cowgill boys have been having a fun time blowing up “privys.” To the uninformed, a privy is an outhouse, and if the City of Weirton can’t solve its water crisis as I write this, everyone in town might just be resorting to one, and in 20-degree temperatures, might I add. I have a suggestion, but I’m sure the city wouldn’t like it very much. Lol.

Okay, I’m exaggerating, but anyway, Grandma hatches a plan to get back at the Cowgill boys. She happens to be a customer of their dairy products, so she lies to one of the boys delivering the milk, claiming she found a dead mouse in it.

After the boy denies this, and Grandma lets it “slip” that she, Joey, and Mary Alice won’t be home that night or the next day. She tells the Cowgill boy that she doesn’t want the milk delivered until she’s back, for obvious reasons.

All of this is a setup, as all four Cowgill boys, instead of blowing up the privy, think they have better ideas. Yep, they break into the home after Grandma, Mary Alice, and Joey shut off all the lights and pretend they’re away.

Earlier that day, Grandma literally put a dead mouse in one of the milk bottles, which she used as “evidence” to support her claim to the Cowgill boys’ parents after she caught them breaking in. Of course, if word got out about the dead mouse in the milk that came from the Cowgill’s farm, she’d put the entire family out of business. But, in the end, the Cowgill boys weren’t wreaking any more havoc in the town.

So, those are the kind of stories that are being told here. Grandma may be a little shady at times, but it’s rather in response to others trying to gain leverage in these situations.

Any libertarian lessons to be had?

In all of my reads, I go out of my way to find something that a libertarian can look fondly at and take away. This one gave me a challenge because, apart from some dialogue that Franklin D. Roosevelt (rightfully part of DiLorenzo’s Axis of Evil, by the way) married his cousin, there were very, very few politically and economically-driven comments.

But, Grandma happened to make one, and it went like this:

Mary Alice: Grandma, there aren’t such things as vampires, are there?

Grandma: Vampires? No. The only bloodsuckers is banks. Movies is all pretend. They’re made in California, you know? But they prove a point. Make something seem real, and people will believe it. The public will swallow everything.”

Ain’t that the truth? The latest audiobook I listened to on Spotify was called Enough Already: Time to End America’s War on Terrorism by Scott Horton. That book alone recounted how many Americans blindly bought into conflicts like Iraq War I, Iraq War II, and the War in Afghanistan, just to name three of the many America stuck its nose in through the first quarter of the 21st century.

I’m not old enough to remember Iraq War I, but I do know that a public relations firm called Hill and Knowlton was brought on to ‘sell’ the war to America - something Horton brings up in his book. And we all know that the events leading to Iraq War II was an outright lie, specifically the claim that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.”

But, if the legacy media drills something down our throats for a prolonged period, and if we’re hearing those same things they drill down our throats in government schools, the workplace, and even professional sports events—spoiler alert, I’m talking about DEI here—then the people will just buy into it without even remotely giving it a second thought.

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So, maybe Grandma Dowdel does have some wisdom between all those “whoppers” she loves to tell and going head-to-head with sworn enemies like Effie Wilcox and L.J. Weidenbach. And oh, she really gets the best of Weidenbach in that final story.

A Long Way from Chicago is a strong recommendation

This book still makes me laugh and it’s always a fast, entertaining read. But something changed since the last time I read it: The heart was rather heavy. I’m at the age now in which all of my grandparents are at least 85, and all are past their respective primes.

I lost my first grandparent on September 1st of this year, so that alone was a whirlwind in what I dubbed ‘the longest week.’ So, given the fact that this short-story cycle is really Joey, as an “old man,” recounting the times he spent with his grandmother, yeah, this one hit home differently.

While I conducted some background research for this book, it was first published, interestingly enough, on September 1st, 1998. I only uttered one word when I found that out: Wow.